


used to be one of the rotten ones

by evewithanapple



Category: Lost Boys (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:33:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21823714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evewithanapple/pseuds/evewithanapple
Summary: Star, the thirst, and a road trip.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 21
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	used to be one of the rotten ones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laCommunarde](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laCommunarde/gifts).



Sometimes Star thinks she’s spent her whole life hungry.

Her memories of early childhood are fragmented, but she remembers crying at the echoing emptiness in her stomach; wondering when someone, anyone, would come and feed her. Sometimes they did. Mostly they didn’t. When she was a little bit older, old enough to get around on her own, meals were something to be snatched from garbage cans and fast food dumpsters - a half-eaten hamburger, a handful of fries sprinkled equally with salt and dirt. She’d licked her fingers clean after every morsel, then sucked on them to make sure she didn’t miss even a crumb of nourishment. Even that hadn’t calmed the gnawing sensation under her ribs, like she was being eaten from the inside out.

When she struck out for California, she’d been hungry too - hungry for food (always, always hungry for food) but hungry even more for a life outside the cramped and cold city streets she’d grown up on. She wanted fresh air instead of smog, wanted to taste the salt ocean on her tongue. She wanted to climb up instead of sideways - towards something bigger and better than what she’d known.

Also, she wanted warmth. California, she knew, was warm; she might sleep on the streets there, but at least she wouldn’t freeze.

Then had come David and the others, and then . . . then the hunger had been something different. Of course there was still the drive to fill her stomach, but there was something else, too: the need to dominate, to be wild, to tower over the weak while they cried and cowered in fear. David indulged in his cravings without shame, laughing all the way to hell. Star held back. It drove him crazy, but Star hadn’t forgotten what brought her to California, derailed though her dreams might have been. She wanted warmth, not eternal night. She wanted freedom, and what David offered wasn’t that. He wanted a bird on a string.

And then there was Michael. Michael was sweet and a bit stupid, and he might have been hungry, but he didn’t know what it _meant_. Not really. But he was a life preserver floating in the water beside her, and she grabbed and hung on tight. She didn’t cry for David, or for Marko, or for the others. She cried for herself, because this was finally it: she was finally going to be free. She was finally going to be not hungry.

At first, she thought she’d simply forgotten what being full felt like; the ever-present ache in her stomach was just a hangover from the fasting years. Only it doesn’t go away. She stuffs herself at the dinner table, so much so that she makes herself sick, but it didn’t help. Sam scrapes his knee trying to do a flip on his skateboard out in front of the house, and a flame lights itself in her belly; she almost starts forward, until Nanook bares his teeth at her. Michael cuts himself shaving, and she wants to press her mouth to the bleeding cut. Lucy buys steaks for dinner, and Star barely restrains herself from snatching one off the counter and sinking her teeth into the raw and bloody meat.

“Do you still feel it?” she asks Michael, dozing beside her in the predawn. The sun, at least, is welcoming to her again; she can lie on the beach without pain, sleep through the night and keep daytime hours. She finds herself waking at sunrise, just for the pleasure of watching the first pink rays of dawn. Michael, who spent so little time away from the sun, will happily sleep until ten. “The hunger?”

Michael blinks at her, sleepy-slow. “I’m . . . not hungry now?”

Star sighs, carding a hand through Michael’s unruly curls. “But are you, ever? Since Max died?”

He just keeps on staring at her, confusion written plainly on his face. _You’re so sweet_ , she thinks, _so sweet and so stupid and you have no idea what the world is. No idea at all._

“Never mind,” she says, and kisses his forehead. The salt taste of his sweat lingers on her lips.

* * *

Not long after that, she says goodbye to Michael and his family and gets on a bus. Lucy fusses, pressing money into Star’s hands “just in case” and refusing to let Star give it back. Sam watches her from the doorway with Nanook, still suspicious. Michael is still bewildered, but she promises to write and senses his relief.

“I’m going to find my family,” she tells him. It’s close enough to the truth.

The bus takes her to New Orleans. She knows next to nothing about other vampires, where they came from or where they might congregate - but she does recall David mentioning the French Quarter once or twice. She doesn’t know if that’s where he came from, or where he intended to go someday, but it’s all the direction she’s got, so that’s the direction she points herself in. Even if she finds nothing of use there, she can see herself getting lost in New Orleans. New Orleans will be warm, like California, but in a sticky sort of way; the medley of humanity that swells against the city limits won’t take notice of one more stray in their midst. She remembers a little bit of Spanish, though she does not remember where she picked it up. Creole and French, she does not speak at all. But she’s been a stranger in strange lands before, and she has faith in her own ability to muddle through.

The city is alive and dead at once, in ways she hadn’t anticipated. She knew it would be throbbing with history, but hadn’t known about the aboveground cemeteries, the towering marble mausoleums flaking brown with age and rust. The curlicued gates are a new and captivating sight, and the balconies overflowing with foreign flags and dragging vines make her want to climb up and see the city from the rooftops. This is, she thinks, a place she could make her way; no hamburgers to be dug out of dumpsters here, but lots of crawfish and jambalaya and muffuletta. She buys some fresh beignets with the money Lucy gave her, and wanders Bourbon Street as she licks the powdered sugar from her fingers. Like all the other food she’s eaten, it doesn’t fill her up, but the explosion of tastes are a novelty that briefly distract her from her unsettled stomach.

At nightfall, she makes her way to the St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. There are so many graveyards in this city, it’s almost impossible to decide which one to start with - but she picks the St. Louis by reputation, because that seems to be the direction all the tourists are streaming in. When she picks up a historic pamphlet and leafs through it, the St. Louis is identified as the most reliably haunted spot in the city. This is where they buried the voodoo queen, and the secret privateer, and the dead mayors and lawyers who litter the city’s history. If vampires linger here, it would be smarter of them to keep to a less well-trafficked cemetery - but, based on Star’s experience of vampires, their desire to self-aggrandize will overcome the fear of discovery any time.

The cemetery is blocked off by another wrought-iron gate, but she climbs over it easily. When she lands on the other side, she’s obliged to kick several loose bricks out of the way where she walks, and grass growing up between cracks in the pavement tickle the soles of her feet. All around her are proud tombs, spires reaching up to touch the stars. There is no one else here: the only breathing she can hear is her own.

Then again, that doesn’t mean she’s alone.

“Little girl, where are you wandering?”

She’s smiling before she even turns around. She may have simply encountered a human denizen of the city with a penchant for flowery language, but she doesn’t think so. She recognizes the cadence from David, and from Max: a voice that’s at once old and young, trying to be normal but unable to resist a flair for the dramatic. There’s a shape leaning against one of the tombs, arms crossed, silhouetted against the last dying embers of the sun. “Who’s asking?”

“A friend,” the voice (male) says, “or a foe. I suppose it all depends on you.” He steps forward, enough for her to see the lace at his collar and at his wrists. “Some would consider this type of trespass rude, my dead. You’re intruding on the peace of the dead.”

“And you?” She cocks her head to the side, still smiling. “Am I intruding on your peace?”

The man’s eyes narrow. “What question do you really mean to ask?”

“The one I did ask.” She takes a few steps forward. She’s wearing an anklet, and it jingles softly against her skin. “Is this your home? Is there anyone else here?”

The man makes a soft _hmmm_ noise, running one long and yellow fingernail across his lips. “We are alone,” he says. “And the others . . . no. There are no others here.” A pause. “Does that disappoint you?”

“I guess it depends.” She stops about a foot away from the man, tucking her hands underneath the corners of her shawl; the sun has taken most of the day’s warmth with it. “I have more questions.”

He spreads his hands wide. “I may not have answers.”

“It’s worth a shot.” She looks at him closely. “Are you hungry? Do I look good to you?”

“That’s two questions.”

She shrugs. “Take your pick of one, I don’t mind.”

He laughs. “Oh, you know this game, don’t you? I am not hungry, my dear. Not right now. And you . . .” He steps forward. A frown crosses his face. “You are . . . not appealing to me, no. You’ve gone off.”

“Gone off?” she repeats. “Does that mean I’m rotting?”

“After a fashion.” He’s circling her now. “You’ve been something else for awhile, haven’t you? Not quite what I am, but not what you once were either.” He reaches out, slides a lock of her hair between his fingers. “It’s an unusual brew. Not many linger in the half-light for so long.”

“I’m not in the half-light anymore,” she says. “I gave it up. So I should be normal again, shouldn’t I?” She realizes as she says it that she doesn’t know what answer she expects, or wants. A month ago, she would have said she wanted normalcy more than anything; but then she had tried to return to what she thought “normal” looked like, and found that it didn’t suit her at all. And not just because of the hunger.

“Oh, you _are_ young,” the man says. His hair is dirty yellow, his eyes green and catlike as they rake over her. “You can’t have thought to linger so long without consequences, could you? Indecision serves no one for very long. Sooner or later, a choice must be made.”

“I made it,” she says. It comes out like more of a question than the statement she’d intended.

“You may have,” he says, “but too late. It will take more than a handful of days to purge the foreign element in your blood. It’s not foreign any longer, dear. It’s part of you now.”

She catches her breath. “Forever?”

“I assume so.” He shrugs. “As I said, your resistance to the gift is rare. Most succumb quickly, or not at all. Few of our kind are patient enough to wait while their offspring dithers.”

She takes a moment to think about that. “Patient” is not a word she would have ever thought to apply to David, but in his own way, he _had_ been. He couldn’t have forced her to feed (she thinks) but he could have simply killed her, or thrown her out to fend for herself. He’d done neither. He’d kept on cajoling her, keeping her close, bringing her gifts like a cat with a dead mouse in its mouth, waiting for her to acquiesce. Like he hadn’t been able to figure out why his new playmate wouldn’t join the game when they were all having so much fun.

In a way, she supposes, she owes him for that. His sheer stubbornness had given her a choice. Had he known she would be driven to this point? Probably not; David wouldn’t have admitted it, but Star had known he knew very little about the condition they all shared. He hadn’t had a very curious mind that way. If Max had told him anything, David had taken it as gospel and never sought a second opinion. And he had embraced vampirism so quickly, the question of what happened to those who prolonged their humanity would never have occurred to him.

“So,” she says, “what now?”

“Now?” He shrugs again. “You go on as you always have, I suppose.” He gives her an appraising look. “Your condition does make you useful, in a way. You can still experience the sunlight. For those of us who require certain things that can only be obtained during the day, your service would be a valuable thing to have.”

She chokes on a laugh. “So I’d be your Renfield?”

“Oh, a step up from that,” he says. “We would feed you. House you. Treat you to all sorts of fine things. And we would be there, if you ever chose to plunge into the abyss. Nothing ties you to us but your own will.”

Star considers this. She had wanted to break free in California - but in California there had been David, and Laddie, and Michael. Eternity spent in the grasping hands of David and his arrested development had repelled her, and she couldn’t bear seeing Laddie made into a monster before his tenth birthday. And there had been Michael, with a family who loved him, who didn’t deserve to lose the light. But she had no family. No Laddie to look after. No David trying to smother her with enough affection that she would join his sundown gang.

“So I can leave,” she says. “Any time I wanted to. I could leave.”

“Of course.” She would not call his gaze trustworthy, exactly, but he makes a salient point: she has something he and the other vampires do not. Something they _need_. Something she could take away and market to the next highest bidder, if she felt like it. Nothing ties her to this man, or whatever friends he has lurking in the city’s crypts. She is, for the first time in a long time, a free agent.

“We’ll see,” she says finally. Her chin is tipped up, eyes meeting those of her new - employer? “I’ll try it out for a few days, and we’ll see. After all,” she adds, “I have plenty of time.”

A smile spreads across his face. He extends a hand, and she takes it; his skin is soft, and cool to the touch. “My dear,” he says, “time is something none of us lack.”


End file.
